1 Life Misconstrued: 1 The Metaphor Machine: How Science Builds Errors Into Its Explanations

The ontology of convenience → the ontology of confusion.

Science, for all its rigour, is not immune to metaphors. In fact, metaphors are the lifeblood of explanatory practice: they let us describe the invisible, approximate the complex, and anchor new phenomena in familiar conceptual soil. But metaphors are double-edged. When unconsciously adopted, they can ossify into what appears to be fact, subtly recasting reality to fit a pre-existing story.

Take the brain. Take a colony of ants. Take a single fungal perturbation in a pupal nest. In each case, metaphor slips in unnoticed and transforms a relational, value-driven process into a narrative of agency, computation, or intention. Neurons are “processors.” Ant pupae “signal sacrifice.” Astrocytes “shape computation.” Each metaphor imposes a foreign ontology — a framework that is comfortable for human cognition but misaligned with the systems it purports to describe.

This is the ontology of convenience: choosing metaphors because they are easy to grasp, because they align with familiar stories of purpose and meaning, because they make a tidy plot. And from the ontology of convenience flows the ontology of confusion: the world starts to appear as something it is not. Biological regulation becomes symbolic communication. Collective perturbations become moral dramas. Neural modulation becomes computation.

The danger is not trivial. Once metaphor masquerades as fact, explanations reinforce themselves. Subsequent research, journalistic coverage, and public understanding are filtered through the same distorted lens. A neuron does not “encode information.” An ant pupa does not “sacrifice itself.” An astrocyte does not “compute.” Yet the metaphors stick, shaping what counts as evidence, what counts as significance, and what counts as intelligible explanation.

To navigate this conceptual terrain, we need a clear guiding distinction: value versus meaning.

• Value is the domain of biological coordination, of viability, of non-symbolic relational modulation. It is what living systems do: maintain, constrain, modulate, and actualise possibilities to sustain themselves and their system.

• Meaning is the domain of semiotic construal: symbolic interpretation, differentiation, and the creation of relational distinctions in a system capable of signification. Meaning does not reside in cells, synapses, or fungal nodes. It arises only in the semiotic practices of organisms capable of symbolic construal — humans being the most obvious case.

This distinction is not a pedantic correction. It is the lodestar for a disciplined science: the cut between what systems regulate and what systems construe, between processes that modulate value and those that generate meaning. Confusing the two produces the seductive illusion of comprehension while leaving the underlying reality unexamined.

In this series, we will follow the trail of metaphors and the errors they produce. We will examine ants that “signal altruism,” astrocytes that “co-compute,” neurons that “encode information.” And through each example, we will ask: are we witnessing meaning, or are we mistaking value for meaning?

Our task is not to diminish the marvels of life or cognition. It is to describe them with precision, to preserve the distinction that allows us to see biological coordination for what it is, and semiotic meaning for what it truly is. Only then can we begin to understand possibility — not as metaphor, but as the actual relational dynamics of living systems.